In 2014, we started this counter-information project dedicated to disseminating and documenting the various attacks on the domain, some of them claimed and others anonymous, maintaining a simple format that kept alive only in and with the very pulse of the conflict.
Without worrying too much, we decided to use the most popular service at the time, “wordpress,” since the websites hosted in other “alternative” servers (noblogs, espiv, altervista, lahaine, entodaspartes, etc.) were not considered to be “alternative”. [altervista does not qualify as an “alternative” server, since it is part of the Mondadori group, ed.]) were often removed, either due to repressive attacks or simply due to the termination of their respective projects.
In October-November 2022 https://noticiasdelaguerrasocial.wordpress.com/ was removed from the web, losing that valuable archive and tool for communication and information among antagonists. Far from appealing to “freedom of expression” or complaining about the servers’ own “privacy policies,” we merely noted the fragility of Internet-based projects. Fragility that we knew a priori, but we decided to bet on informal communication and the diffusion of living and latent conflict.
Questions remain in the air: what are the characteristics of our media? How solid are they? What is their degree of autonomy? Do we have our own infrastructure of communication and counter-information? How dependent or susceptible are we? We need to draw some collective lessons from the Italian state’s repressive attack on communication tools such as Radioazione, Culmine or “Vetriolo.”
Escaping from that false sense in which domination controls everything and the spread of anti-authoritarian ideas survives only through the permission of the powerful, we can delineate that the strength of anarchist media lies in their dispersion, multiplication, proliferation, not in their centrality. On the one hand, their format: websites, networks, newspapers, magazines, bulletins, e-mails, messages, papers, ink and all. But above all, the generation of rich counter-information environments in which information circulates by copy/paste, without settling into a single centrality; this mode, quite active in the first decade of the 2000s and before the advent of social networks, has allowed much of that experience to still be traceable and not simply erased by the removal of a single website. Virtuality has its limits, we know, but it never hurts to remember that and look for collective solutions.
We are currently looking for a new “home” to give continuity to our project.
We sincerely thank all comrades who trusted this space and gave it validity.
Solidarity with the prisoners of the social war!
In defense of our spaces and tools of communication! In defense of revolutionary violence and those who employ it!
Noticias de la guerra social
November 2022
E-mail: noticiasdelaguerrasocial[at]riseup[dot]net
Note from “La Nemesi”
We publish with interest this text written by the comrades who ran the website Noticias de la guerra social, which represented an important archive of claims and documents from Chile. The text raises important questions, especially in light of the repressive operations that-in Italy, but we are also witnessing similar events in other countries (such as the United Kingdom, see for example the closure of 325 in 2021)-intended to affect certain publications and websites (between which we believe there is, however, a consistent qualitative difference, as the former allow for a level of in-depth analysis and potential material dissemination that is impossible for online projects).
Noting the current characteristics of the publications and especially of the “counter-information” initiatives that exist and have existed online, and since we think (as we wrote in the presentation of ” La Nemesi”) that a website such as this one serves to “amplify the magnitude and possibilities of the agitation and propaganda of anarchist ideas.” we consider it necessary – as has been done in multiple publications over the past decades – to continue to confront the linguistic and cultural impoverishment taking place in this society of digitization and “flexibility” in every field, confronting it with our critique and practice (so that, in this way, the potential of our communication tools can also be tested and refined). In this sense, the exhortation to reflect on the conditions and characteristics of websites and publications is positive and thus deserves further study, which we hope will take place in the future.
A brief clarification starting with some of the websites and publications mentioned in the text because they were the subject of different investigations by the Italian state. The Culmine and Radioazione websites were involved in the Ardire (2012, Perugia public prosecutor’s office) and Scripta Manent (2016, Turin public prosecutor’s office) operations, respectively, with the Ardire investigation acts – as far as the charges pertaining to Culmine, Iconoclasta and Parole Armate are concerned – flowing into the Scripta Manent trial, at the end of which several comrades were sentenced to sentences ranging between 2 years and 6 months and 1 year and 6 months for incitement to commit crimes with the aggravating factor of the purpose of terrorism in connection with the management of the Culmine, Iconoclasta, Parole Armate, Croce Nera Anarchica (a project that also included an aperiodical journal of which four issues were published), Radioazione and Anarhija. The anarchist journal “Vetriolo” was the subject of investigations by the Milan and Perugia prosecutors’ offices under the coordination of the National Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism Directorate, which later merged into Operation Sibilla (2021, Perugia prosecutor’s office, investigation still open today), for which jail time was requested for eight comrades (a request later changed to six precautionary measures, including an arrest warrant for Alfredo Cospito). An operation – the latter, Sibilla – which among other things led to the “preventive seizure” (blacking out) of the websites Roundrobin and Malacoda, currently inaccessible through conventional search engines. Finally, also dating from recent years is the final conviction for incitement to commit a crime to 3 years for some comrades, including Alfredo Cospito and Anna Beniamino, as part of Operation Shadow (2009, Perugia prosecutor’s office), in connection with the publication of the revolutionary anarchist sheet “KNO3.”
[Published (except for the note from “La Nemesi”) in Spanish on Nov. 7, 2022 at https://lapeste.org/2022/11/ante-la-bajada-de-la-pagina-noticias-de-la-guerra-social/ | Italian translation published at https://lanemesi.noblogs.org/post/2023/04/10/a-fronte-della-rimozione-del-sito-internet-noticias-de-la-guerra-social-cile/]